


For you have dancing shoes, with nimble soles

by Verona_Rupez_Canyon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (and eventually hugs I promise), Dancing, Fluff, Gen, Light Angst, Music, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Team as Family, and receives music instead, but also natasha romanoff, lana del rey - Freeform, the aforementioned Good Bro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:08:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29264046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verona_Rupez_Canyon/pseuds/Verona_Rupez_Canyon
Summary: Natasha listens to five Lana del Rey albums, at various stages of her life, with various friends.-(you don't technically have to have listened to any lana del rey to read this)
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton/Laura Barton, Laura Barton & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 2





	1. Born To Die

**Author's Note:**

> This idea was spawned during my extensive Lana del Rey phase, because the lyrics kept reminding me of all my favourite avengers. It's just a framing device for fluff though. The five chapters correspond to the five albums up to and including NFR!, in chronological order, set around the time of each irl release date.
> 
> The title is a bit of a paraphrase of a Shakespeare quote, spoken by our favourite drama queen, Romeo: "... You have dancing shoes/With nimble soles. I have a soul of lead/So stakes me to the ground I cannot move."

Natasha hadn’t had a framework for what was normal back then, when she was new to America and to SHIELD and trying her hand at being as close to a civilian as she would ever get. Music was just one of the things she was getting used to. It was common the Barton household. Even at ten months old, Lila had a favourite song. Soon, Natasha had begun to identify patterns: soul music was almost exclusively reserved for Saturday cleaning, for example. It helped her feel less adrift when she could predict things like that, less like a stranger.

Almost six years later, Natasha was used to the music, and she’d accepted at some point along the way that she really was welcome. The room at the end of the hallway had gone from being the guest room to “Auntie Nat’s room.” It had a few personal touches now. Some pictures the kids had drawn. The candles Clint had bought her in Prague, which she lit sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. Most of her clothes were stored in the wardrobe here. The rest were in her room at SHIELD, but this was home in a way nowhere else ever would be.

It was a weekday morning, the kids were already downstairs by the time Natasha left her room.

Listening ahead as she padded down the stairs, the little voices of Lila and Cooper, Laura’s “let’s hurry things up now” tone, followed by rapid sounds of breakfast-eating greeted her. Nothing out of the ordinary, though the song she could just about hear was new. She paused to listen for a few seconds at the kitchen door.

“ _Don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry. Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don’t know why.”_

It made her smile as she entered the kitchen, where it took the kids about three seconds to escape their chairs and fling themselves at her. They greeted her with a tiny chorus of “good morning”s, which she returned, then she picked Lila up and led Cooper swiftly by the hand back to his chair. Lila was replaced in her own. She wasn’t about to be the one who made them late for school.

Laura informed her of Clint’s whereabouts (the barn, fixing something or other), and that the kettle was boiled, so Natasha went to make herself a cup of tea. The speaker was on the kitchen counter, so she could hear the new song more clearly. “ _Choose your last words, this is the last time, ‘cause you and I, we were born to die”_

She called over to the kitchen table: “Who chose the song?”, and immediately Cooper’s face lit up.

“I did! It’s called Born to Die, Jamie told me about it.” Natasha quickly located Jamie’s name on her mental list of Cooper’s school friends.

“Who’s it by?”

“Lana del Rey. Her voice is really pretty”

It sure was. Natasha tucked the name away for later.

“ _I was so confused as a little child, tryna take what I could get, scared that I couldn't find all the answers, honey”_

_-_

Clint came back in to say goodbye to the kids, then settled on the sofa next to Natasha, who had moved on to her second mug of tea and a new book.

Quiet moments were another thing that had taken her a long time to learn to appreciate; but now they were a little routine. Whenever they were at home with no immediate emergencies to attend to, Clint and Natasha would take time to sit in companionable silence with a hot beverage of their preference and read, or (less relaxingly) finish paperwork. More often than not, Laura joined them.

Today their silence was overshadowed by the vaulting strings and melancholy imagery of Video Games. Natasha payed more attention to her book, but Clint leaned his head back and closed his eyes and listened.

“ _Watching all our friends fall, in and out of old Paul’s, this is my idea of fun._ ”

When it was over he tapped Natasha’s foot with his own and told her it was nice,and their next few months were soundtracked by the album as it was sung along to by two enthusiastic young voices at home, and listened to on shared headphones during the tedious stretches of their missions.

-

Three weeks after the Battle of New York, Natasha made her way back to SHIELD, and after a quick stop at Maria’s office, knocked on the door to Steve Rodgers’ room. His face as he opened the door was easily readable. Tired, clearly; and grieving… but keeping it together well. He was also more than a little surprised to see her there.

“Agent Romanoff—“

“Natasha”

“Sorry, Natasha…”

“Can I come in?” She made sure to make it clear it was a genuine question, not an order. He hurried aside to let her in. His room was full of books. Books everywhere: on the desk, on the floor, on the bed, stacked in neat little piles. Everything else in the room was standard-issue SHIELD furniture.

“You’ve been catching up?” Natasha asked.

He moved a stack of the books off a chair so she could sit. She glimpsed a high school textbook on the Cold War and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

“Well, apparently I was overextending myself with the New York cleanup operations, and since they moved me here there hasn’t been much else to do,” Steve said a little sheepishly.

She’d heard about that. Of course she had. “Have you got anyone to talk to?” It was blunt, but it was meant to be. He was probably sick of people tiptoeing around him.

He smiled as he settled on the bed. It was a little ironic, but it was there. “Everyone’s either too busy, or too intimidated.”

“You lucked out then. I can be neither, if that’s what you want.” She hadn’t meant to sound like she was flirting. Force of habit. But this wasn’t a mission, she was here because she wanted to be. Then his ears turned red and she decided some accidental flirting wasn’t the end of the world. “I know what it’s like, being new here. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s not a bad place to be when you’ve nothing to go back to. But I had Clint. So if you need a friend, I’m here.”

“Thanks,” he said gratefully, “How’s Barton doing?”

“He says he’s fine, but Fury won’t let him come back to work for another few weeks at least. Staying home for a while has been doing him more good than he lets on.” And then, with a casual shrug, to change the subject away from _home_ : “Tell me, what can I do for you?”

As it turned out, he’d been given a phone, but not nearly enough instruction in how to use it. She spent several minutes showing him how to use it to play music, and they found and listened to several of his old favourites before he asked her to play him something new. Lana Del Rey came to mind, because it was half of what she had been listening to for months, and because the all-American, vintage vibes reminded her of Steve.

Tempting as it was, she didn’t plunge him headfirst into Off to the Races. Instead, she pressed play on Blue Jeans.

Steve leaned back against the wall, hands clasped behind his head, and nodded along with a curious smile. Natasha shifted too, stretching out her legs until they rested next to Steve’s on the bed.

“… _I would wait a million years, promise you’ll remember that you’re mine. Baby, can you see through the tears?”_

Steve wasn’t smiling anymore. _Uh oh._ For the rest of the song, he looked about a million miles away. Whatever it was that had struck a nerve, he he managed to shrug it off once the song was over. Church bells signalled the beginning of Video Games.

_“Swinging’ in the backyard, pull up in your fast car, whistlin’ my name. Open up a beer, and you say ‘get over here’ and play your video game.”_

“What’s a video game?”

_Damn. Should have seen this coming._

This was going to take a while, so Natasha paused the song to explain. It took ten minutes, a demonstration of online PacMan, and a lot of terrible analogies, but eventually Steve had run out of questions, and Natasha hit play again.

_“They say that the world was built for two. Only worth living if somebody is loving you…”_


	2. Ultraviolence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Context: This one takes place soon after Winter Soldier. A few months, maybe.

_I’ve blown all my covers, I gotta go figure out a new one._

-

Really, there is no _you_. No glowing green jewel at the centre of your chest, that encapsulates who you really are. Something as definite and fundamental as an atom, or your DNA. Or if there is, Natasha has never been able to find it. Not for lack of trying; for years after she left Russia she’d been trying to find a foundation to rebuild herself on. But for a while now, her theory has been this: people are made up of their walls, their windows, their floors and their attics. What they build with the materials available to them. What they value, what they’re good at, and who they want to be. It’s changeable, it’s not reliably quantifiable, it’s not comforting. But it means that you have power over who you are, and that’s something. She doesn’t have proof that she’s a good person, but she wants to be, so it’s a part of who she is.

If she’s honest with herself, much of who she wants to be is based on Clint. She trusts his sense of right and wrong. But another part of her identity is bound to SHIELD, and now that SHIELD was not only gone, but rotten (and had been all along), she had to figure out how to cut it back out of her identity without letting other parts of her come tumbling down with it. Identity Jenga™.

Which is how she ended up being woken up in the middle of the night in a cold apartment on the other side of the world by a text.

It was from Clint. Of course it was. He’d been in contact a lot over the past few months. Ostensibly, it was because Stark wanted her back on the team and kept bugging him about it, which was probably true, but she also knew it was because he missed her.

Steve had called a few times in the beginning to check in, but he was more easily put off by her insistence that she be left alone. Stark wouldn’t have been, but he didn’t have her number. And she wasn’t going to give it to him, not even to spare Clint.

**Clint:** _Mind if I call you?_

She called him instead.

“Is it good or bad?”

“Nice to hear from you, too,” he said, and she could just picture him feigning annoyance. “It’s good. I think.”

“Spit it out”

“Laura’s pregnant.”

Ok. That was unexpected. In fact, those two words had just blown up Natasha’s world a little bit. She took a moment to reassess her foreseeable future before she responded.

“You’re naming this one after me, right?”

Clint laughed from five thousand miles away.

-

Natasha walked the last mile from the train station in town, duffel bag over her shoulder. The route took her through a lot of countryside, and autumn was starting to turn the trees flame-coloured, sending skeleton-leaf ashes to the ground. Cold would be settling in properly soon, but for now there was still some warmth to the world.

The moment she came into view of the farmhouse, there was a blur at the window and barely a few seconds before the front door flew open and Lila and Cooper came tearing towards her.

“Auntie Nat!”

“We missed you!”

Coming home just never got old.

-

Hours later, with the kids in bed, the grownups could collapse in the living room with tea, not wine, out of solidarity for Laura. Clint did not mutter “leaf water” under his breath.

At some point during their wandering conversation, Laura walked over to the CD player in the corner of the living room next to a small shelf of CDs. Both had been around longer than Nat, and both would be disappearing into one of the sheds in about nine months, because babies and fragile things do not coexist well. The previous two had taught them that over the course of a half-dozen sunglasses.

She rifled through it, and pulled out a CD with a grey cover.

“Lana’s new album is out, did you know?” she called over her shoulder.

“I didn’t. But you liked it enough to get it on CD, apparently.”

“Yeah, it’s good. We had to censor it a bit for the kids, though, there’s a couple songs on here they aren’t allowed to listen to.” Laura delicately removed the CD from its case and put it in the machine.

Natasha’s eyebrows rose. “Really? Well now I’m definitely interested.”

Laura grinned, and skipped straight to track 9. The moment it began, Clint laughed knowingly. Natasha leaned forward, and listened intently.

“ _Life is awesome, I confess…”_

She spared a glance at Laura, who was starting to sway to the music.

“Wait for it,” she muttered…

_“I fucked my way up to the top, this is my show…”_

“Ah.” Natasha grinned.

Laura held out her hand to her, and she let herself be pulled to her feet. The two women began to dance haphazardly around the room. Clint leaned back and watched with a smile. Gradually, Natasha started to cotton on to the lyrics, and started to sing along. When the song ended she made her way back to her seat with a twirl, and Laura pulled Clint off the couch instead.

“ _Blue hydrangea, cold cash divine… Cashmere cologne, and white sunshine._

_Red racing cars, sunset and wine… the kids were young and pretty.”_

Natasha spent most of Old Money in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, far enough away that she didn’t feel like she was intruding on Clint and Laura’s dance. She watched and didn’t have to miss them anymore.

By the time she’d finished her tea and the mug was in the dishwasher, Old Money was fading. Laura approached her.

“Are you hiding?” She said gently.

“I didn’t want to intrude.”

“Well, it’s safe to come out now.”

They crossed back into the light of the living room as the next track began:

“ _The other woman has time time to manicure her nails…”_

It sounded familiar and old. It took a moment, but Natasha placed it as a cover of Nina Simone. The Other Woman. Nina was an old favourite in the household.

Clint was singing along: _“The other woman enchants her clothes with French perfume. The other woman keeps fresh cut flowers in each room. There are never toys that scatter everywhere”_

At that last line, he gave an exaggerated glare at the plastic tiara and errant lego pieces that lay on the carpet. Natasha practically giggled. The travel, late hour, and softness of the music were all lulling her, and she let them, sinking into the couch and propping her feet up on the coffee table.

_“The other woman will always cry herself to sleep. The other woman will never have his love to keep. And as the years go by, the other woman will spend her life alone…”_

Nat watched as Clint kept trying to make Laura laugh, and thought _thank god we avoided that situation._

He noticed and looked over, silently asking “you alright?”

She nodded back.

**Author's Note:**

> So, that's chapter one, I hope it works. Thanks for reading and have a good day!
> 
> (Thoughtful feedback much appreciated.)


End file.
